The Role of Technology in Fake News

Often accused as the machine responsible for much of the fake news that is generated today, technology can also play a major role in counteracting the problem. The internet and social media have made it cheap and easy to perpetuate. That makes it a potential threat to democracy while denting trust in the mainstream media.

Technologies like graph databases that are capable of analyzing gargantuan amounts of data and uniquely pull out connecting relationships have the innate power to probe fake news. Investigative journalists used graph technology to trawl through terabytes of data and leverage connections to produce the infamous Panama and Paradise Papers. The use of knowledge graph by Google to enhance its search engine capabilities and map out the web makes it easy to understand why graph technology could also be a swift remedy to filtering out fake news.

The use of a number of machine learning algorithms to build and feed a “news graph” can lay the foundation for analyzing news from multiple perspectives, providing additional insight into the inclinations and credibility of individual news articles and their sources.

Social media platforms and governments must make a stance against the people behind the fake news before it topples the status quo. Since spotting the relationships in a huge dataset without the right tools is impossible for humans, graph makes sense because as it is specifically designed to analyze data in this way. Also, it is paramount that the patterns of behaviour are understood in the pattern it produces when looking for connections within data sets. Governments and social media platforms can use graph technology to proactively detect and prevent fake news from spreading across the globe by joining the dots and analyzing datasets.